Some Year End Thoughts typed on a train ride from Princeton to NYC

I went on a train ride yesterday to Princeton. K., came along and on the ride, we spoke about this and that. Nothing in particular except, as the wit goes, the world at large. For someone as laid back and phlegmatic as him, when the conversation turned to India and its future, he sprung to life. The possibilities and lack within Indian politics suddenly animated much of our conversation. For most parts, I kept my inner most thoughts on these matters private. Perhaps because I am still unclear about how to speak of it with any precision. What is the right language to use which allows me to see the world of my cousins and their families, their economic and social travails, without slipping into some tired cliches. How am I to ensure the maximal correspondence between Indian realities and how we seek to conceptualize it. What is clear to me is that, as of now, we are living on someone else’s intellectual dime and labor to describe our worlds. So inundated are we with unthinking labelling and glib usage of vocabularies — secularism, Other-ing, fundamentalism, fascism — that were discovered elsewhere, it is hard not to conclude that much of Indian political life has lost its ability to think and invent new vocabularies for itself.

But is discovering our own vocabulary necessary? After all, if we are happy to use Google from California and Airbus from France, why should we shy away from using ‘fascism’ from 20th century Italy and ‘socialism’ from 19th century Germany to describe our realities. I don’t know. But, I can’t shake the thought that language (much like religion, as Gandhi insisted) must arise out of material conditions it must be used in and via the histories it seeks to describe. Perhaps two millenia of conquests — since the Saka invasions in 2nd century — makes any such quest of authentic language a fool’s errand, a recidivist’s dream, a cynic’s Hail Mary pass to render meaning. That said, the fact that our political life and its stewards see little use in thinking about the provenance of the present vocabulary we use or the mutated forms that we now employ freely — tells how little such questions concern us. We are content with being a society that traffics in derivative ideas. From our films to our political vocabularies, we have become reliant on imported ideas. This may not be bad for country like Singapore or Ecuador, small, pint sized nations who must channel resources prudently. But in our case, borrowings have become a national characteristic.

So awash are we in questions (did India elect an authoritarian? Is statement X fascistic etc) courtesy our public intellectuals who, eager to span their fields of expertise and attract eyeballs to their content, that they, like Quixote, see wizards and demons where perhaps merely men and non-working windmills exist. There is a certain comedic aspect to it all, if it weren’t so close to home. What is evident is that few of our public intellectuals are truly free — financially, socially, to get published, to be seen as acceptable to the genteel society — in the way, say Nassim Taleb is, or Montaigne was. They remain beholden to invisible terms of indenture that society has drawn for them. So, words like civlizational ethos, Hinduism, dharma, varna, etc acquire a potency in our debates. They are viewed with suspicion or on the other side of the political spectrum as dog whistles for the faithful. Either way, the descriptors have begun to supercede the described.

Even in our conversation on the train, the ease with which we throw about secular constructs like multiculturalism, the Other, Orientalism strikes us both as awkward precisely as we speak of seeing past the cluster. In a way, it merely reveals how overwhelmingly our daily discourse is shaped by a particular kind of language courtesy the thinkers of Europe. Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Gramsci, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, Said et alii remain the bright constellations of thought by which we chart the skies of our public debates. That the radical worlds of Marx and his descendants have been appropriated by a secular, profit maximizing world of corporate universities for their humanities curricula and by intellectuals who are fire and brimstone till the next Ford Foundation or Soros Fellowship application is on offer, has an irony of its own. Making it worse is the fact that the subversion of the original text — not in words, but by eliding their revolutionary claims — in the Anglo-American academia is deemed as a litmus test for acceptability into Indian life tells us of how uncritically we concede to some thought. But even this borrowing is piece meal. We rarely hear of Japanese or Chinese or African thinkers in our public sphere. Ironic or not, the hard nosed calculus of career making is writ large and these borrowed vocabularies are markers and signaling mechanisms. None of this is however new. This is how the elite have always been produced. A fierce crab eat crab world. But, for the first time, we have a non-intellectualizing class that is privy to the dynamic of this elite creation. How are the members included, who must say what, what must condoned, who must be criticized.

They see that while a handful of well positioned ones continue to garner social capital by strategic gamesmanship, a vast number of fellow citizens and perhaps themselves have become flotsam as old ways of social, caste, familial & personal associations come undone. To describe this breakdown, without being smug, or obscurantist is what we hope our intellectual class can help us do. But this is hard work. For it involves thinking anew of the reality that they see. This involves seeing and not just looking. Or even if they look, to recognize with humility that they are mere onlookers. Instead, fattened by their commitments to extant intellectual order by using its favorite vocabularies, they shy from the hard work of describing new Indian realities anew. This would involve going past the vocabularies they so fondly use and instead recognizing that the correspondence between the sound that our favorite descriptors make and the reality it seeks to approximate may be widening.

At Princeton, surrounded by friends and friendly people, this world of liberal, cosmopolitan and freethinking world feels like a bubble. I feel like an observer, one incapable of immersing myself into their worlds, despite their affections. Our ways of seeing the world, if pushed hard, might be radically different. In a discussion with one of my hosts, talk inevitably revolved around Modi and his online supporters. I try to hint at the root causes of the disaffection. No doubt, I did it somewhat incoherently. My host drifted away when I mentioned that maybe those who gracelessly interact on social media are those who have been on the periphery of intellectual power who now are slowly finding a way to speak the grammar of public life. Perhaps, I should have been more sensitive. My hosts have been on the receiving end of abuse and malicious attacks; and at some point, after being repeatedly abused, it is likely that one simply forms an aversion, a deep instinctual dislike for foul mouthed online avatars, behind which may indeed be all too human reasons. I can empathize with my host; but the great ocean of online humanity — in its vilest, in its most irreverent forms — is here to stay. It is both a fact, and worse, a phenomenon out which spins new realities.

If one were to think of Indian public life and nature of its interactions — the hard question is where in does all this discomfort, this anger, this fury towards the establishment figures emerge from. When the worlds of the privileged, like my hosts in Princeton, interact with the wider Indian world — which is all too often dismissed among them as simply reactionary — the intercourse devolves into private anxieties and public displays of meanspirited furies. Part of this disconnect, between the liberal types and their online bete noire, comes from the radically different cultural worlds the two inhabit. One lives in a world of ideas, a world which affords them the luxury of nuance, of cultivated ironies. It is an intentional stance towards the act of living — an intentionality that is born from the freedom to endow meaning to worlds they traverse in. Behind this freedom lies a safely anchored sense of economic security. The other side — the middle class, Rightist base — scrambles to make sense of the world that changes fast, to seek control over the world that slowly undermines their ability to impose meaning on it. Being here, amidst my hosts, it is not hard to think that civility and, its handmaiden, hypocrisy, is a luxury good. The better off one is, the more elaborate are the ruses to convince oneself of the purposefulness of the world that has been constructed.

It is tempting to push this idea of ‘two worlds’ further and convince oneself that this is how the world works; but I realize that would too be an illusion. But, this is a good first working model. Like all else, the world of course defies this simple reductionism but I suspect there is some truth in this idea. That the world is divided into two spheres. is not new. At least since CP Snow, before him Spinoza had similar ideas, and well before them Zoroaster had a dyadic vision of how morality infuses the universe. The reason this idea of duality has survived is because there is something comforting about this kind of a reading. Perhaps dividing the world into twos is man’s original instinct. But, as I grow older, as I read more, what seems interesting is the inbetweeness, the cracks that fall on the wall that divides the two. As Gulzar writes in one of his verses, how does moisture seep in from the cracks. To think of this inbetweenness that people live in is the real challenge of our political vocabulary. As India grows, we belong to neither, or both. We belong neither to the villages that we have left nor to the cities that is yet to turn us urban. We belong neither to an ancient world of tradition and custom but neither are we so far removed that there is no recall. In fact, we probably are furiously reinventing our villages in our cities. Whatever it may be, the political vocabulary used by our elites betrays neither any angst about falling short or, worse, a recognition that we be describing our political lives entirely in a wrong manner.

The views outside the train are green, open and the landscape seems unending. America is a large country, larger than all the facts and figures can tell me. I tell K, who is a bond trader by day, a wanderer otherwise, about the loneliness of small platforms that we pass by. For similar reasons, we are both reminded of India, of home, of stations that rush past when the “super fast” express train imperiously whistle past. There, in those obscure hamlets, only the goats and the lonely platform attendant watches the trains go by. Those stations of my imagination were at the edges of small, nondescript villages. There, like elsewhere, people are born, marry and eventually die. For decades, these places have existed on their own. Now suddenly, electricity, Twitter and Facebook tells them about the great metropolises that gleam with (an illusion) of possibilities, of sons & daughters of powerful families who express views on their lives, on their moral universes. Despite migration into towns and cities, for the first time many slowly discover the smallness of their own villages, the constricted ends of their lives, the ‘overcrowded barracoons’ that is their daily refuge they call home. And worse yet, as they slowly recognize the impossibility of escaping from their lives, thanks to contingencies of geography & economics, a recognition arises that there is no escape from the iron laws of economics and society that advertises itself as open. The open-endedness of the world slowly seems like an illusion. []

(Sketches/watercolor by ‘artist’ Madanan )